Pride Of Plate

No trip to the seaside is complete without fish and chips – but they’re no longer just a beach treat, and whether you prefer yours served gourmet style or wrapped in paper, we discover the origins of this great British dish.

- Anna Maria Barry

There’s nothing more delicious to round off a day at the beach than tucking into a portion of freshly fried fish and chips. At resorts all around the coast, customers flock to get a taste of that salty, vinegary, crispy delicacy. Take Frankie’s in Shetland where battered scallops and chips are a staple, Stein’s Fish & Chips in Padstow where grilled mackerel and chips is on the takeaway menu, and Darthmouth’s Rockfish, with its line-caught Norwegian haddock, fried skin-on, for maximum juiciness.

‘As British as fish and chips!’ goes the saying, and Man of the Century Winston Churchill famously called the dish the ‘good companions’. While fish and chips has been part of our food culture for many a year, it took several centuries for the combination we love now to come about. The potato came first, discovered growing in the Andes by Spanish colonialists of the 1530s, reaching British shores by the 1580s. The sturdy vegetable soon proved immensely popular as a cheap, filling food for the masses, and by the 19th century fried potatoes had become a favoured street food. Charles Dickens offered one of the early accounts of chips. In A Tale of Two Cities (1859), he describes ‘husky chips of potatoes, fried in some reluctant drops of oil’.